


starving night

by average_lasagna



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, No Dialogue, Pre-Canon, Pre-Season/Series 01, Reginald Hargreeves' A+ Parenting, literally only say names seven times in this which was. interesting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:15:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27792901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/average_lasagna/pseuds/average_lasagna
Summary: When he eats, he does so like he’s starving. He’s the first in a line of seven ravenous monsters never meant to survive themselves. How could he ever be done?~Or, an exploration of the Hargreeves and the side effects of superpowers.
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Claire & Allison Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy (Umbrella Academy) & Everyone
Comments: 20
Kudos: 56





	starving night

**Author's Note:**

> hjsjdskladj absolutely went FERAL thinking about this concept.....

Luther doesn’t stop growing. He leaves black bruises on targets as a child and breaks his own bones each time he stumbles, too strong for something as delicate as his own body. He re-breaks and sets them when they’ve mended together twisted and wrong, always harder than they were before and just as painful to have. 

His skin is so thick he cuts himself while shaving and only notices when he grows light-headed; he stares down at the sluggishly bleeding wounds already covered by a mat of hair and doesn’t feel anything. 

He walks hunched over and rips the soles out of every pair of shoes he owns to fit through doorways. Back home, he doesn’t have to do that. He has a garden with clean air, siblings who stay, and a father who uses his name. Back home, he doesn’t have to be relieved to be alone, that no one can see him, because he’s himself, and everything is better.

Of course, he’s never really had that home.

No, here, on his beautiful moon, he shoves down shame as he looks himself in the mirror. Burns cover his arms and back, twisting and numb in that painful way. He watches his wrinkled skin knit itself over them. No matter what he does to himself, all that can ever be left is his father’s actions. 

When he eats, he does so like he’s starving. He’s the first in a line of seven ravenous monsters never meant to survive themselves. How could he ever be done?

The world shrinks when he wakes up in a body that was never his, screaming.

~

Diego never learns to move properly. Life exists in bursts of sudden, jarring twitches, blinking faster than anyone else and falling slow the next second. There’s an itch under his skin that gets worse the longer he stays awake. 

He twirls a knife in his hand, faster, faster, until his entire body shakes, and life around him collapses into abstracts, nothing beyond shapes and colors. He spends hours convulsing and wakes a second after picking up the knife, blood dripping from his hands and stomach empty.

He closes his eyes.

He forces himself to breathe in the way he forces weapons through the air, directing his own breath and stilling the world around him. He forces himself to breathe like he won’t if he doesn’t, and he knows he’s right. There’s a ventilator in his old room and three hospitals on his speed dial. He passes out during fights if he focuses on too little, too much, shapes and colors, the bullets flying through the air and not the air moving through him.

He wraps tape around his scraped knuckles, sews the cuts on his arms shut, and ignores the prickling in his eyes when he looks at his mother’s cross-stitches for too long. He plasters a cocky grin on his face when he walks into the police station, a blooming bruise on his cheek and a tip for his favorite detective on his tongue. Once, he tried to stop running, just to stand by her. But the only way to stop is to crash and burn, and he can’t kill them both.

It’s always been easier to deal with her cold tone than her soft, private smiles, anyway. 

His fingers, wrapped with puffy white scar tissue, tangle into his hair. His eyes have always been open, and he never slows down.

~

When Allison speaks, molten silver coats her tongue and burns through her. She carries lozenges in her bag like a lifeline and screams at the mirror until it cracks. When she looks at her daughter, she hears her father’s voice telling her she can never be anything other than selfishly cruel, and she swallows her bile.

She confines herself to one childish phrase to stop every word from scratching her throat raw. She spits blood into tissues before grinning at cameras. There’s a crumpled tabloid clutched in her manicured hand, an interview with the dynamic daddy-daughter duo that she tortured alive. Clutched somewhere within that is her court-ordered therapist’s patronizing and too-cheerful smile asking her to speak louder.

Her wedding had been beautiful, with her lover and her perfect life around her. Her daughter is beautiful, too, and she would watch the tapes with her and tell her everything she knew about the moon. She would kiss her husband goodnight and charm the cast and crew with her stories. It was easy, then, to be good. It should be even easier now to be better, to make herself better. It isn’t.

When she leans over the toilet late at night, white-knuckled and vomiting commands, the pieces of her rearrange and destroy themselves. She never learned who she is in the same way that she never learned to let herself be silent, to let the world turn without adopting a new role. 

She curls around herself in an empty loft, whispering for change, for her hunger to cease. She replaces her father’s harsh words with her own and cracks her teeth to stop the rumors spilling out.

~

Klaus is always losing himself. His fingers, nimble and swift and oh so blurry, sew pockets inside each shirt he owns, which tends only to be one. He drags a cigarette from his lips as he staples stolen air fresheners into fabric, all smelling nauseating and far better than his decaying skin. 

The voices turn him inside out, drowning him with their spiteful, desperate hands. Everything is so _loud_. He’s a dead man born into a living body, falling apart from the outside onwards, in equal parts the child of his father’s screaming mausoleums and of something unnameable.

He chases the high of hearing silence and burns a hole into his own skull like it’s something he earned. He wakes up somewhere new each night. The hands leave scratches down his sides, leaking blood and the vague sort of not-life he only ever gives to his brother, and the cotton in his head spills out of his ears.

His brother trails slowly after him, calling out scathing comments in the same bored tone he always has. Once, they tell each other how much it hurts to be dead, dead in a living body, dead in a ghostly one, but all it does is make things hurt more. They don’t talk about it again.

He kills a stranger and hides the body somewhere in the forest. He wakes up buried in dirt, living and hungry and aching. Afterlife tastes like ash and lemon meringue pie, and until it all fades from his memory, he walks like the dead men taught him how to. The voices never leave him alone.

~

Five covers every inch of his skin. He always has, ever since he was a baby and his birth mother flickered between phases of her life, bright-eyed and gray-haired, wrinkled hands the size of a child’s, burning away before she could even hold him in her arms. He’s time’s favorite son, who could kill and grow entire forests with just his bare touch, but who never has the time to.

He has never been more than an anchor, a rock moving not through the timestream but forcing it to move around him. It’s as easy as anything for him to wake up in the wrong body at the right time, three days too old or four years too different. When he was younger, a child too arrogant and too bold in his father’s eyes, he would wake up and grip his sheets and force himself back into place, each scar forming and disappearing until he was as he should be. 

He only removed his father’s gloves on missions, reality dissipating as he let his powers loose, weaving through time and space and shoving his victim so far into their own future they turned to dust. His siblings wouldn’t notice, too busy making use of their own desensitization, and he would be glad his sister couldn’t see them.

He had never bothered finding gloves in the future. His apocalypse lover had never asked him to, invulnerable to his shifting form and immune to his shifting touch, the same touch that burned away his sibling’s bodies without ever meaning to.

He only put the gloves back on when he met her. She’s his savior in the same way he’s her favorite goddamn TV show. They only touched once, in the wasteland, when they shook hands and a bullet wound appeared and disappeared on her forehead. He wears her gloves instead of his father’s, now. She hands him briefcases (which move through time like bullets through stone as far as he’s concerned), and he covers the equations and theories he scribbles over his body with tailored suits.

He yearns for people he doesn’t remember the faces of and brands his sister’s story into his thoughts. Blood pours from his mouth, pools around the shrapnel in his chest, stains the shirt on his back. He’s always bleeding, never has, and thinks about collapsing time as he stands on the grassy knoll, gun in hand.

~

Ben lives in monochromatic shades of other lives. Tiredness spreads through him, quieting his regrets, yet keeping him just concerned enough to trail after his family. He lives as his brother imagines he could have, aging unfeelingly and barely changing. The scars from his past have disappeared.

Something itches under his skin, dulled by death but still constant. In his lack of a reflection, he sees their anger. He feels them shift between his bones and push behind his eyes. They ripped him apart, painful and slow, and for all their struggle, they only ever managed to get trapped in him.

His birth signed an unspoken agreement that he dreamt of on dreamless nights and remembered each time something eldritch burst from within him. They loved him in the way they loved what was theirs, and they helped him, knowing that’s what he would eventually be. Upon his death, they would drag him into their clawed, waiting arms, and he would let them, not because he cared but because he had to. They splattered him in gore when his father asked. They kept him alive when he starved out of his mind. It didn’t matter that they carved burning runes into his skin or that their bloodlust left him sick to his stomach; he would’ve gone with them.

But then they got selfish, tried to speed up the clock, and he got dead. 

They carve their runes into his insides, now, their perfect ghost prison, and he knows he’ll keep them trapped until they’re out of their minds as well. He always preferred dark to the Light, anyway.

He sneers at the horrors that tilt their heads curiously at him, many-limbed and many-eyed in a way that only he can see, and steers his brother away from them. He doesn’t feel pain, not in the way a stumbling clairvoyant can, but his skin never stops itching.

~

Vanya is... empty. She always has been, back when she was a child in a too-small room and as an adult in a too-small apartment. She takes her meds on an empty stomach, plays her music to an empty auditorium, stares at the first chair with an empty gaze. She’s part of a family through nothing but name and the violin she took from her father.

When she thinks of the wild, desperate passion of her siblings, she thinks of the callouses on the pads of her fingers, the bow of her instrument held in precisely the right way, the way she slips out of practice unnoticed. She thinks of robberies and bar fights and their mother humming while cleaning blood from the carpet. She takes a pill.

There are glass shards on her bathroom floor, crunching under her shoes, and she stares at her cracked reflection. She presses her palm to the center of it all and relishes in the way her hand stings. She must have shattered it last night, crashed into it after her shower, and simply never noticed. She sweeps and takes a pill, practices her upcoming part, and doesn’t see the cracks grow with each chord she plays.

Power was a thrashing ocean that she could never drown in, she types onto faded paper. She clung to her music like a lifeline, like it would somehow let her join the waves that broke around her. When she was younger, she writes, she dreamt of destroying the world her siblings wanted to save, if only to make them look at her. When she was younger, she wanted to create her own symphony, a chorus of those crashing waves, that desperate passion. But her violin never dragged her underwater; the lonely boat she floated in never sprung any leaks. She never could compose something her siblings--the ones left, at least--found worth listening to.

She still has that dream, though, of her family’s world in flames, everything and nothing silent all at once. Blood drips from the glass.

There isn’t an ocean, she reminds herself, only a woman in her too-small apartment with her too-loud childhood dreams. It’s only a mirror she cracked accidentally and a first chair she’ll never have, a half-written autobiography to make her neighbors shun her.

She takes another pill and picks up her violin.

**Author's Note:**

> !! thank you for reading :)
> 
> my tumblr: rusty-pulley-stars  
> my TUA blog: new-timeline-new-me (i'm Mod J)


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